macnn
01/17/2008, 11:10pm, EST
Thursday, January 17th
Apple squashes 24hr movie rental workaround
Apple has corrected an issue where users were able to circumvent iTunes' 24 hour time-limit on its new movie rentals service. Earlier today Gizmodo reported that changing the system time -- on either Windows-based PC or a Mac -- by moving it forward or rolling it back, effectively allowed users to continue to watch the movie past the designated 24-hour period. In a follow-up report, Gizmodo notes that Apple has now disabled the circumvention technique by adding an additional check in iTunes. Changing the date/time, now yields a 5103 error from iTunes, according to the report.
"Alright so it appears to no longer work. Here's what happened on our end. Before, we had set our computer date to 2009, and started playing Ratatouille (and Benny started playing The Simpsons) to start the 24-hour timer in 2009," the site wrote. "Came back to 2008, everything was gravy. We go to play it again just a few minutes ago, and it tries to connect to iTunes, and then gives us a 5103 error. Benny gets the same deal."
Filed under: hacks
Other story tags: iTunes, movie rentals, circumvention
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Homer - "He's not Spider Pig anymore he's Harry Plopper."
Hey, Apple, maybe if you didn't limit the time to such a stupid and small interval people wouldn't be trying so hard to circumvent it.
I imagine the studios will have had a significant input into the time your have to watch the movie.
Yeah, like no other movie service does the same thing. Like Amazon's Unbox...
if it was 7 days people would try to hack it and our dear boy would trash apple for such a stupid and small interval. that's what he does. that's all he does.
But I thought Apple could yield their big stick and get what they want. Why not say "24 hours, that's nuts! Make it 36 or 48!" (and what is the big deal with just 24 hours. Are the studios fearful you'll enjoy it so much you'll want to watch it twice over a weekend, stealing money from the poor craftsmen who've put their time and efforts into it?).
I always find it funny when people bring up these type of arguments. "Oh, you can't do that with Unbox, so why complain to apple!"
I don't know, I thought Apple tried to be different, not just one of the many. Then again, they've also arbitrarily determined that HD rentals can only be viewed on the AppleTV. But I'm sure that's OK, because you can only view HD content on an Unbox or XBox or whatever...
As for the AppleTV, the fact that HD rentals are only on AppleTV doesn't sound so arbitrary given the fact that the device is HDCP-compliant and most regular PCs/Macs are not.